How do clouds interact with other systems – like mobile devices which are already in/on their own cloudopen source cloud: simple, extensible, widely available and popular technologies, easy to install and maintain

examples: U Chi, Nimbus, on GT4 and Globus (from grid computing), but not looking for when grids act like couds

Enomalism now called ECP (startup with open source), difficult and pretty opaque

How to know if it’s a cloud? try things on it that you can do on amazon web services (like in the interface) and see if it can do these things (no strict definition of “cloud” just knew a cloud when they saw one, AWS).- software overlay so it didn’t really monkey with the underlying infrastructure (with some grid things you had to blow away your operating system, install a whole bunch of libraries, and it was really difficult to know what it was doing and to support it)

A driver of this was to save money – researchers wanted to work in the commercial cloud, but it’s really expensive. If nothing else, they can use this to debug before moving into the commercial cloud.Goal to more like democratize – not to replace Amazon and Google services at all – but to allow for other people to try things, but you won’t have their data centers, you’ll still need to have the hardware (and other things).

This is my blog on library and information science. I'm into Sci/Tech libraries, special libraries, personal information management, sci/tech scholarly comms.... My name is Christina Pikas and I'm a librarian in a physics, astronomy, math, computer science, and engineering library. I'm also a doctoral student at Maryland. Any opinions expressed here are strictly my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or CLIS. You may reach me via e-mail at cpikas {at} gmail {dot} com.